October 4th 1926. André Breton wanders aimlessly toward the Opéra with a newly purchased book by Trotsky under his arm. The offices and workshops are emptying out, and Breton muses to himself of the workers leaving for home ‘it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution’. Then, as he crosses an intersection, he sees a young poorly dressed woman ten feet away; she carries her head high, ‘unlike every one else on the pavement’, Breton notes; but if she has a kind of pride, she is also delicate (‘she scarcely seemed to touched the round as she walked’). There may have been, he remembers, a ‘faint smile’ on her face (better: ‘wandering across her face’); she was made up strangely, her eyes are emphasised. She comes towards him, the young Surrealist, smiling 'mysteriously' and 'somehow knowingly’. Breton is entranced; she begins to speak of her poverty and he asks himself: what was happening in her eyes? 'What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?’ She tells Breton the name she has chosen for herself: ‘Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’. Then she asks Breton a question echoing the one he asked himself in the opening lines of the book: ‘Who are you?’ Who are you? Margaret Cohen’s beautiful book about Benjamin and the Surrealists, she notes of those same opening lines that they make play with a French adage ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes et jet e dirai qui tu es’, tell me whom you haunt (in the sense of frequent) and I will tell you who you are. Breton makes it apparent that he appropriates this expression in other than its colloquial sense in the following passage (the fourth paragraph of Nadja): I must admit that this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, less avoidable, more disturbing than I intended. It says much more than it means, it makes me play while still alive the role of a ghost, evidently it alludes to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. As Cohen observes, ‘Breton goes from suggesting that haunting is related to the places and persons that one frequents to reflecting on how this dependence starts to undermine the integrity of the I itself’. But this undermining is marked in the first lines of the text and sets its problem. This is why, Cohen points out, the translation of différentiation as ‘difference’ in the following quotation is so misleading: ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to know in what my differentiation consists, if not what is responsible for it’. Differentiation, not difference: when he asks ‘who am I?’ the answer comes: ‘a series of ghosts’. Ghosts of a self, a subject? Of course, Breton’s book is full of ghosts. But when he asks himself, ‘who am I?’ we know Breton is after something unique to himself: ‘What matters is that the particular aptitudes that I discover slowly down here distract me in no way from the search for a general aptitude, which would be my own and which is not given to me’. What will he find? How will Breton answer his question? Will he answer it at all – or does it reverberate through every sentence of his book, a question which turns in itself, a cold whirlwind, asking with quiet insistence over and again: ‘Who?’: scarcely a question, then, but a kind of demand, and scarcely a demand for it as though it was spoken from that frightening reserve into which Nadja herself will disappear. As though the question was born out of the same madness that would claim her - or as if this were one of the question's risks. Nadja itself – the book that bears the young woman’s name, which uses it to name (but it cannot be named) that same madness – is Breton’s answer. Nadja is a psychoanalytic session, a free association (‘I will speak of these things without pre-established order and according to the whim of the hour which lets survive whatever survives’); as such, it is also given to us, his readers, to decide what his answer to his own question might mean. For many, Breton is too dominant; he is callously indifferent to Nadja’s incarceration, to her madness; he toys with Nadja and then discards her. He cuts a pathetic figure: the surrealist researcher, supposedly committed to the Revolution is indifferent to this impoverished young woman; the writer who would give himself to the blind play of chance cannot follow her all the way to madness. Yet there is a hint that Breton's identity is itself unstable - that he will lose himself just as Nadja is lost. The narrator's encounters form a series whose contiguity cannot be resolved into an underlying identity; it is as though both Breton and Nadja have coalesced from the Parisian night mist into which they will disappear; as though the book which bears her name were written in mist and will likewise disappear. This, at least, what suggests itself in the many ghost-stories which fill this book. Recall the humorous story of Monsieur Delouit, the amnesiac who asks a clerk in the hotel lobby for his room number and then, having gone to his room, jumps from the window and questions the clerk once again. Recall, too, the fugue which allows Desnos to take on Duchamp's personality, or Eluard’s mistaking Breton for a deceased friend. Then there is the story of the thriller in which a Chinese man replicates himself thousands of times and invades New York; and the painting by Watteau in which the same couple is shown over and over. Finally, there is Nadja herself, who appears to be only one of a series of women, real and unreal (Madame de Chevreuse, Mélusine, Solange and the actress Blanche Duval, who plays her, the young woman who recites Rimbaud to him in the rain -). And what of Breton himself? Who am I? Breton asks; shortly after, he will call himself a phantom, seeking to learn of his identity by exploring the places he haunts and the encounters which haunt him. Breton seeks himself in the ambulism which would allow him to follow a path in the world which is dictated by the subliminal desires of the phantom. Above all, these phantasies entangle him in a complex realm in which the real historical significance of, say, the sculpture of the Porte Saint-Denis and the statues of Etienne Dolet on the Place Maubert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Place du Panthéon were bracketed, put out of play. As though such a bracketting permits him to see a beauty linked to their now massive uselessness (what do they commemorate? Nothing - not anymore -). This recalls Breton's celebration of the perverse objects of the flea market and perhaps even what he writes of the Surrealists themselves ... Differentiation: is it this that is unleashed once the scuptures and objects are torn from their contexts, their worlds? Or when the Surrealists themselves, besuited young men, conservative in so many ways, practice their sleeping experiments and their seances? Or when the question, 'Who am I?' is allowed to reverberate without answer as Breton encounters in Nadja the one who, for a time at least, demands he forgo any attempt to answer his own question? His book will bear Nadja's name, not that of Breton's unnamed lover. So it is that Breton is caught out and that it is his book - even the very title of his book -, not he, who speaks the truth. Nadja, a text which bears the name of hope, of the first part of the word hope, is marked above all by a restlessness, a wandering; here is a text which must be understood according to its own avowal to record everything. But perhaps it records too much for it is as though Breton’s phantom wrote Nadja and that what is related is the story not only of Breton's own adventures but those of a double who wandered in his place; as though Breton was himself put out of play.